ASHM Report Back

Clinical posts from members and guests of the Australasian Society for HIV, Viral Hepatitis and Sexual Health Medicine (ASHM) from various international medical and scientific conferences on HIV, AIDS, viral hepatitis, and sexual health.

PrEP models of care - Dean Street Clinic

This afternoon I attended a round table discussion on PrEP, after the opening ceremony. It seemed everyone in the conference was there as the room was packed!

Rebecca Houghton will be blogging about this in more detail but I wanted to touch on the excellent presentation by Dr Emma Devitt from Dean Street Clinic in London as this was another analysis of a model of care, but of a single service. It is well known that the Dean Street model of care is progressive and hearing her discuss the way the service has actively adapted to the needs of the community in it's location, design, and flexible staffing is a lesson we should absorb. The clinic's redesign in 2014 to include an express service running 6 days a week is of note as it takes full advantage of many technologies that are available to us; videos explaining self-specimen collection that play within the mirror in the bathroom; and their GeneXpert has been calibrated to bypass a middle man and text clients their results directly. Inspiring stuff! She highlighted that express models still require medical staff on site to support nurses and health care assistants, and also discussed how the delivery of PrEP is evolving in their clinic with nurse prescribing.